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Govt issues fresh storm warning for Bengal, Odisha, UP and Bihar

The home ministry also put the toll from the thunderstorm and lightning in several north and west Indian states at 124.

A tree uprooted in the Wednesday’s dust storm in Agra district .(PTI)

The government on Friday issued a fresh warning for thunderstorms in West Bengal, Odisha, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh even as several states continued relief work in the aftermath of Wednesday’s powerful dust storm that left more than 100 people dead.

The home ministry put the toll from the thunderstorm and lightning in several north and west Indian states at 124.

The Met department also issued an alert about likely storms in several areas. “Thunder storm activity is common in this weather. Certain meteorological conditions favour severity of the storms, right now conditions are favourable. North-west and north east region and southern peninsular area are expected to see thunder storm activity,” the department said.

A chain of powerful thunderstorms, a freak pre-monsoon phenomenon that experts blamed on a confluence of various weather factors, pounded parts of north and north-west India leaving a trail of destruction in at least six states.

Hundreds more were injured in the storms that packed windspeeds of up to 130 km per hour, and wrecked mud houses, damaged crops, uprooted trees and electricity pylons, cutting off power supplies and disrupting train traffic in Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttarakhand, Madhya Pradesh, Punjab and Haryana.

Western Uttar Pradesh and neighbouring eastern Rajasthan bore the brunt of the storms.

A cyclonic circulation, induced by a western atmospheric disturbance, high moisture levels brought by easterly winds and a recent spell of unusually high temperatures that soared to 45 degrees Celsius were responsible for the thunderstorms, Kuldeep Srivastava, a senior official at the India Meteorological Department (IMD), said.

SAINT PETERSBURG: A
homemade bomb blast at a supermarket in the Russian city of Saint Petersburg injured 10 people Wednesday, officials said, sparking a
probe into attempted murder.

"According to preliminary information, an explosion of
an unidentified object occurred in a store," a spokeswoman for Russia's Investigative
Committee, Svetlana Petrenko, said in a statement.

The blast was caused by a "homemade explosive device
with the power equivalent to 200 grammes of TNT filled with lethal
fragments," she said.

"The investigation is looking at all possible causes of
what happened," she said, adding that a probe for attempted murder had
been launched.

The incident comes several months after Russia's second city
was rocked with a metro bombing in April which killed 16 people and amid
concern that hundreds of Russian citizens who travelled to fight alongside
jihadists groups abroad could pose a mounting security challenge back home.

Rattled by a one-two
punch of betrayal and scandal, Donald Trump on Thursday tried to block the
publication of a bare-knuckle book that portrays his White House as a fetid
stew of backbiting, incompetence and dysfunction. The publishers
responded by moving the release date up by four days to Friday. Trump instructed his
lawyers to prevent the release of “Fire and Fury: Inside
the Trump White House” -- an expose by author and political muckraker Michael
Wolff -- which quotes key Trump aides expressing serious doubt
about his fitness for office. The book -- which
paints Trump as mentally unstable and far out of his depth -- quotes at length
his former ally and chief strategist Steve Bannon, who also received a “cease and
desist” order from Trump’s attorneys. “Your publication of
the false/baseless statements about Mr. Trump gives rise to, among other
claims, defamation by libel, defamation by libel per se, false light invasion
of privacy, tortious interference with contractual relations, an…